Albuquerque Journal from Albuquerque, New Mexico • Page 28

D10 ALBUQUERQUE JOURNAL Friday, February 16, 1990 4F ark Wind' Set To Navais tel1 Sound Garden's Metal Love Blooms at Valentine's Show Summer Hillerman they like his books because they are true to Navajo and the Navajos come out winners. "They didn't like the ending," he says. They were unhappy about the unresolved relationship between officer Jim Chee, also the protagonist of "Dark Wind," and Navajo attorney Janet Pete. Maybe they'll like "Coyote Waits" better; Hillerman promises they haven't heard the last of the Chee-Pete romance. Despite the mystery, witchcraft and violence of his books, Hillerman bristles at any suggestion the reservation might be a dangerous place.

"In the Navajo culture, all goals are toward harmony, being peaceful, working together. People who turn against this are the worst kind of people," he says when asked to define a Navajo witch. What does he like most about the Navajo? "I like their emphasis on taking care of the family," says Hillerman, who has six grown children. "I like the dignity they give their women. I like their attitude about material possessions.

They just don't attach any importance to them. There's the idea that if you own too much, you probably aren't taking care of your family. "I like the emphasis they have on beauty, aesthetics so many Navajos seem to have a good eye for the sunset, the pleasing design. "I like their sense of humor, their stoic endurance of whatever comes down. They endure." cals of Prong's Tommy Victor were a monotone cry of angst over the speed metal bass and drums of Mike Kirkland and Ted Parsons.

It was a sound that straddled the fine line between melody and dissonance, colored with shades of Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Hen-drix's "Manic Depression." Voivod, on the other hand, was all speed and practically zero its singer gesturing wildly, pleadingly when he wasn't singing, eyes wild and mouth open as in a silent scream. But when the songs ended his tight face would melt into a friendly grin at the applause from a crowd of definite Voivod fans. Promoter Andrew James said he probably lost some money on the show (despite sales of more than 500 tickets) because the bands demanded a different sound set-up and check when they arrived (which delayed the show two hours). But sound-wise, the show was a success. Ear plugs weren't necessary because theater manager Ian Parks asked the bands to comply with a 110 decibel limit and though known for loudness, they agreed.

(Parks said Soundgarden exceeded the limit by 6 points and Voivod by 4, but it was negligible.) Martha Housen, who leases the building for events, said she will continue to hold an entire spectrum of musical events in the theater and eventually use it also for drama, when dressing rooms backstage are refurbished. Once threatened with demolition for a revitalization project that never materialized, the Sunshine has become an interesting slice of downtown night life. Matt Cameron create a sonic blast of speed over which comely and shirtless Chris Cornell lingers with his vocals, his cries and strong falsetto stretched out even longer with mechanical sustain. Juxtaposed over that is Kim Thayil's guitarwork, which wails. At times, their music evokes a lone cry of humanity on an echoing cliff in a storm, but then rhythmic swirls are swept up and packaged in a definable number, like "American Woman" by the Guess Who.

It's the kind of music that makes one want to kick up her feet and dance in a twirl of hippie abandon. Except the Soundgarden crowd prefers to either stand transfixed or "mosh" step onto the dance floor and bash each other and Cornell (who at the outset threw himself into the crowd headfirst and was almost thrown out by security) encouraged them with a circling motion over his head. The scene on the floor was like schoolyard bullies maneuvering around and into each other in a territorial skip, bobbing and bashing and then dispersing as quickly as they had come in. But it was controlled chaos. Patrons were frisked for spikes and weapons at the door, no alcohol was served, and security ringed the circle of "moshers" to protect those on the fringe.

"Hard core speed metal is considered the most violent of shows, outside of rap, but this crowd was well-mannered, well-behaved," said Mike Bruton, owner of Prestige Security, after the show. "As long as there's adequate security, it's fine." The music of Prong and Voivod was also controlled chaos. The vo Film This CONTINUED FROM PAGE D1 Tony was his high school class historian but never gave much thought to writing. "I kind of liked to write and I read i lot, but I didn't know real human beings were writers," he says. "I mean writers and writing were not something in the imagination of a kid growing up out there." 'The idea took seed when a wounded Hillerman returned on convalescent furlough from France during World War II.

A land mine explosion had shattered his left leg and severely burned his left eye. The leg still bothers him sometimes, and he never regained full use of the eye. Beatrice Stahl, a feature writer for the Daily Oklahoman in Oklahoma City, had done a story based on Hillerman's letters home, and now she wanted to interview him. "So I went down there and talked to her. She told me I ought to be a writer." He took her advice and studied journalism at the University of Oklahoma, where he also met his wife, Marie.

But when he graduated amid a flood of war-delayed students in 1948 he couldn't find a job on a newspaper. "So I took a job with an advertising agency writing radio commercials. It was just a try-out job doing ads for Cain's Better Coffee and Purina Pig Chow," he says. He also took a job driving a truck hauling oilfield supplies. One stop was the Navajo reservation in New Mexico.

On one run, he saw Navajos on horseback in ceremonial attire for the Enemy Way, a soul-cleansing ritual that follows combat. These were returning veterans like himself. "Of course most of them served in the Pacific," he says. Something about them touched him, and he never forgot. From then on, he says, New Mexico was his For Merman, Writing Becomes the Mystery By Denise Tessier JOURNAL CORRESPONDENT Can love exist in the overbuilt, overamplified industrial world? On Valentine's Day, Seattle's "zen metal" group Soundgarden posed that existential question on the one "love song" it offered during its intense 50-minute musical set at the Sunshine Theater.

On it, the guitar squeaked like a generator under steam pressure. The bass and drum QFVIFW joined in a "CVIC purposeful drone with all the subtlety of a blast furnace. The singer's voice hovered above it like a floating scream: "I lu-u-u-ve you." Love's standing in this nebulous swirl of musical power was tenuous. (Even more so when one learns that the title of this Valentine treat was "Big Dumb But there is a place for Soundgarden in the so-called heavy metal scheme of musical things, and it's a melodic place even non-metal fans can love. This was made all the more clear Wednesday because Soundgarden was the middle act in a triple bill sampler of heavy metal music.

The speed metal trio Prong and Canada's hard-core Voivod were the other two groups. Soundgarden's prowess is power. Its sound has been called "grunge" or "heavy muddle," but it is not messy or muddled. It is commanding, interesting rhythm with flourishes of psychedelia and feedback allusions to Jimi Hendrix (Seattle's most powerful musical export). Jason Everman's bass playing is among the mightiest since Mountain, and he and drummer yd, yd.

If si ji in i' ii NSCV ultimate destination. After breaking into newspapers, Hillerman was working for United Press in Oklahoma when he grabbed the chance in 1952 to become UP bureau manager in Santa Fe. He served as executive editor of The Santa Fe New Mexican after leaving the wire service and before moving to Albuquerque, where he got his master's degree and began teaching journalism at the University of New Mexico. During the Santa Fe stint, Hillerman covered a story in which a Jicarilla Apache policeman was shot to death. The investigation showed the fallen officer had coolly shifted his revolver from his wounded arm to his good hand and had shot one of his assailants before dying.

The Apache officer is the model for Navajo detective Lt. Joe Leaphorn, mainstay of m6st of Hillerman's novels. Hillerman had sold some non-fiction through a New York agent. When he offered her the manuscript in the late 1960s for his first Leaphorn novel, "The Blessing Way," she told him: "Just get rid of all the Indian stuff." "Probably it was fairly good advice, but it wasn't what I wanted to do," he says. An editor at Harper Row liked it, Indian stuff and all.

It was published in 1970. His third novel, "Dance Hall of the Dead," won the Edgar Allen Poe Award for best mystery of 1973. Navajos tell Hillerman they like his books because they are true to Navajo culture, and the Navajos come out winners. In fact, he says, many Navajos express surprise upon learning he's not a Navajo. "I run into that when I sign books around the reservation," he says.

Hillerman, who retired from UNM in 1986, has been critiquing English papers from the Hopi Senior-Junior High School, where a class read "Talking God" and offered comments. copy, and I was reading it, arid I thought where the hell did they get this stuff? Then, I remembered it was the book I was going to write. I made a frantic phone call and said we better reconsider this." The book he did write involves a 19th century Colorado train robbery in which the loot, such as it was, included a bunch of postage stamps. "Well, they weren't worth much then, a penny apiece, but now they're worth a hell of a lot," Hillerman says with a chuckle. Many Hillerman characters are scholars archaeologists, professors, curators and graduate assistants.

His central character, Navajo de Hillerman tective Lt. Joe Leaphorn, has a degree in anthropology. In "Coyote Waits" there is a feud between two professors of Western history. The facts of the train robbery would prove one historian's theory about a famous train robber, Butch Cas-sidy, Hillerman says. And the old shaman is the source of an oral history about that event.

"The literature's full of books based on what was said by old, old Navajos who remember mythology, remember curing ceremonies. There's a lot of such Navajos around." Hillerman says he has learned at least half of what he knows about the Navajos from books, "and then I go and look a lot." By the end of the month, Hillerman says he will mail his computer disks of "Coyote Waits" to Harper Row, and the book will come out in June. ming, sculptor of leather masks. Wild StrawberryMuddy Wheel Gallery, 4505-07 Fourth NW. Through Feb.

28: "St. Theresa." Fred R. Wilson, architectural clay murals; Kristen C. Wilson, collage. Yucca Gallery, behind La Hacienda Restaurant, Old Town.

Through February: Dorothy Hibbs, oils and watercolors; Gladys Jenkins, oil, mixed media, miniatures on candy rock; Fran Krukar, pottery. CEDAR CRESTSANDIA PARK Gallery of the Sandias, one-half mile north of Sandia Peak turnoff on N.M. 14. Steve Goldman, ceramics; Julie Hunze, hand-painted silk. DEM1NG Deming Center for the Arts, 100 S.

Gold St. Through Feb. 25; "Choice Selections." Works by Arturo Alvo, Richard Baron, Harry Benjamin, Sharon Bode Hempton, Christina Campbell, Gordon Dipple, Cecil Howard, Sherry Lorraine, Diana Lyon, Karen Mobley. MORE: See ARTS CALENDAR on PAGE D11 I 4 S. 1 By Richard Benke ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER When Tony Hillerman starts writing a story, it's almost as much a mystery to him as it will be to his readers.

The Edgar-award-winning mystery writer says his intricate plots, mostly set on or around the Navajo reservation, are seldom laid out in advance. That's unfortunate, he says, "because I think it would be much easier to write them if you had the kind of intelligence that let you think a book all the way through, and I don't have that, and I never had it, and I wasted a lot of time trying to outline books before I discovered it's just not my forte. "So now I just have a basic idea, theme and some points I want to make and a place I want it to be set in, which is for some reason important to me, and I go look at the place, a lot." For example, his newest book, "Coyote Waits," in its final stages in Hillerman's computer, starts with a Navajo tribal policeman being killed and an old man, a shaman, being arrested. Hillerman says the question of who was guilty and who was innocent changed in his own mind 180 degrees by the end of the book. But he says he had to tell the publishers something early on.

"They had to have a description of the book," he says, "so I gave them one, see. And the description I gave them, the book I intended to write, has absolutely nothing to do with the way this book has actually taken shape." Based on what he told them, he says, the publishers went ahead and printed up a dust jacket. "They sent me the dust jacket I Bonus off LrLnjLSlR CARPETS fU CARPETS CARPETS SPECJALGROUP3. lfe SPECIAL GROUP sPJCJAXGROUPXl I SELECTION OF I 3 SELECTION OF PLUSHES i mcm PILEWORRY FREE A I coSwC1ALPM LEVEL-LOOPS, SCULPTURED LOOMiVEL LOOPS ht comtfW mm mtrtq. yd.

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YD. STAIN PROOF PLUSH PILE COMPARE AT 25 SQ. YD. CONTINUED FROM PAGE D3 March 4: "The Art of Enlightenment," 18th-century graphics from the permanent collection. UNM Jonson Gallery, 1909 Las Lomas NE.

Through Mar. 23: "Rose Marie Prins: In the Realm of Aphrodite," mixed media. UNM Maxwell Museum of Anthropology. Permanent: "Ancestors," 4 million years of human emergence. Through February: "Legacy of a Leader: Miguel Antonio Otero, Territorial Governor," commemorating UNM's centennial.

Weems Gallery, 2801 Eubank NE, East-dale Shopping Center. Ralph Leyba, oils; Kris Eberhard, leather jewelry; Doug Ballard, watercolors. Weems Gallery-Winrock, 129 Winrock Center. Georgia O'Keeffe, new prints; R.C. Gorman, prints; Robert Redbird, prints and original works.

Weyrich Gallery, 2935-D Louisiana NE. Through March 31: Phil Chambless, inlaid jewelry; Elizabeth Abeyta, clay; John Flem- FINANCING AVAILABLE WITH APPDOVfO CEO)T PROFESSIONAL INSTALLATION AVAILABLE Unique Look Long wearing COMPARE AT PHONE 764-0311 FOR IN-HOME SHOPPING SERVICE 'Menool ftRABY I-40 2400 4th St. NW Serving Albuquerque for Over 30 Years Open 9-6 Monday through Saturday.